The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art and an independent charity opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985. Exhibitions which drew upon the collection of Charles Saatchi, starting with US artists and minimalism, moving to the Damien Hirst-led Young British Artists, followed by shows purely of painting, led to Saatchi Gallery becoming a recognised authority in contemporary art globally. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames, and finally in Chelsea, Duke of York's HQ, its current location. In 2019, Saatchi Gallery became a registered charity.
Recent exhibitions include the major solo exhibition of the artist JR, JR: Chronicles, and London Grads Now in September 2019 lending the gallery spaces to graduates from leading fine art schools who experienced the cancellation of physical degree shows due to the pandemic.
The gallery's mission is to support artists and render contemporary art accessible to all by presenting projects in physical and digital spaces that are engaging, enlightening and educational for diverse audiences. The Gallery presents curated exhibitions on themes relevant and exciting in the context of contemporary creative culture. Its educational programmes aim to reveal the possibilities of artistic expression to young minds, encourage fresh thought and stimulate innovation.
In 2019, Saatchi Gallery transitioned to becoming a charitable organisation, registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales under charity number 1182328, with the aim of reinvesting revenue into its core activities to support broad access to contemporary art.
Contents
History
Boundary Road
The Saatchi Gallery opened in 1985 in Boundary Road, St John's Wood, London in a disused paint factory of 30,000 square feet (2,800 m2). The first exhibition was held March—October 1985 featured many works by American minimalist Donald Judd, American abstract painters Brice Marden and Cy Twombly, and American pop artist Andy Warhol. This was the first U.K. exhibition for Twombly and Marden.
These were followed throughout December 1985 – July 1986 by an exhibition of works by American sculptor John Chamberlain, American minimalists Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Robert Ryman, Frank Stella, and Carl Andre. During September 1986 – July 1987, the gallery exhibited German artist Anselm Kiefer and American minimalist sculptor Richard Serra. The exhibited Serra sculptures were so large that the caretaker's flat adjoining the gallery was demolished to make room for them.
From September 1987 to January 1988, the Saatchi Gallery mounted two exhibitions entitled New York Art Now, featuring Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Peter Halley, Haim Steinbach, Philip Taaffe, and Caroll Dunham. This exhibition introduced these artists to the U.K. for the first time. The blend of minimalism and pop art influenced many young artists who would later form the Young British Artists (YBA) group.
From April to October 1988, featured exhibited works by American figurative painter Leon Golub, German painter and photographer Sigmar Polke, and American Abstract Expressionist painter Philip Guston. During November 1988 – April 1989 a group show featured contemporary American artists, most prominently Eric Fischl. From April – October, the gallery hosted exhibitions of American minimalist Robert Mangold and American conceptual artist Bruce Nauman. From November 1989 – February 1990, a series of exhibitions featured School of London artists including Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Howard Hodgkin.
From January to July 1991, the gallery exhibited the work of American pop artist Richard Artschwager, American photographer Cindy Sherman, and British installation artist Richard Wilson. Wilson's piece 20:50, a room entirely filled with oil, became a permanent installation at the Saatchi Gallery's Boundary Road venue. September 1991 – February 1992 featured a group show, including American photographer Andres Serrano.
County Hall
In April 2003, the gallery moved to County Hall, the Greater London Council's former headquarters on the South Bank, occupying 40,000 square feet (3,700 m2) of the ground floor. 1,000 guests attended the launch, which included a "nude happening" of 200 naked people staged by artist Spencer Tunick.
The opening exhibition included a retrospective by Damien Hirst, as well as work by other YBAs, such as Jake and Dinos Chapman and Tracey Emin alongside some longer-established artists including John Bratby, Paula Rego and Patrick Caulfield.
Hirst disassociated himself from the retrospective to the extent of not including it in his CV. He was angry that a Mini car that he had decorated for charity with his trademark spots was being exhibited as serious work. The show also scuppered a prospective Hirst retrospective at Tate Modern. He said Saatchi was "childish" and "I'm not Charles Saatchi's barrel-organ monkey ... He only recognises art with his wallet ... he believes he can affect art values with buying power, and he still believes he can do it." (In July 2004, Hirst said, "I respect Charles. There's not really a feud. If I see him, we speak, but we were never really drinking buddies.")
On 24 May 2004, a fire in the Momart storage warehouse destroyed many works from the collection, including the Tracey Emin work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95 ("the tent"), and Jake and Dinos Chapman's tableau Hell. A gallery spokesman said that Saatchi was distraught at the loss: "It is terrible. A significant part of the work in his collection has been affected." One art insurance specialist valued the lost work at £50m.
In 2004, Saatchi's recent acquisitions (including Stella Vine) were featured in New Blood, a show of mostly little-known artists working in a variety of media. It received a hostile critical reception, which caused Saatchi to speak out angrily against the critics.
Saatchi, said that most YBAs would prove "nothing but footnotes" in history, and sold works from his YBA collection, beginning in December 2004 with Hirst's iconic shark for nearly £7 million (he had bought it for £50,000 in 1991), followed by at least twelve other works by Hirst. Four works by Ron Mueck, including key works Pinocchio and Dead Dad, went for an estimated £2.5 million. Mark Quinn's Self, bought in 1991 for a reported £13,000, sold for £1.5 million. Saatchi also sold all but one work by Sam Taylor-Wood (he showed five in the Sensation show). The sale was compared to his sale in the 1980s of most of his postwar American art collection. David Lee said: "Charles Saatchi has all the hallmarks of being a dealer, not a collector. He first talks up the works and then sells them."
Duke of York's HQ
On 9 October 2008, the Gallery opened its new premises, described in The Observer as one of "the most beautiful art spaces in London", in the 70,000-square-foot (6,500 m2) Duke of York's HQ on King's Road, London, near Sloane Square. The building was refurbished by architects Paul Davis + Partners and Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. It consists of 15 equally-proportioned exhibition spaces "as light, as high, and as beautifully proportioned as any in London".
The main opening exhibition was of new Chinese art, The Revolution Continues: New Art From China, bringing together the work of twenty-four young Chinese artists in a survey of painting, sculpture and installation, including Zhang Huan, Li Songsong, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Haiying and conceptual artists Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. The show's focus was on political issues surrounding China's Cultural Revolution and also the contemporary political context. The decision to open with The Revolution Continues was directly influenced by global interest in China as a result of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Jackie Wullschlager in the Financial Times said it was "the most persuasive showing of contemporary Chinese art yet mounted in this country", and, contrasting it with the "deadly" contemporaneous Turner Prize show, "Saatchi's collection of Chinese art is one that Tate would kill for, and could not begin to afford"; she said that it was "an example of a private museum grand and serious enough to compete with national institutions."
More recent exhibitions include the London-leg of the touring show Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh, the solo exhibition of the artist JR, JR: Chronicles, and London Grads Now in September 2019 lending the gallery spaces to graduates from leading fine art schools who experienced the cancellation of a physical degree show due to the pandemic (described by critic Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times as "a good idea. Saatchi Gallery deserves a slap on the back for organising this selection of work from grads shows, a highlight of every art student's education". The Gallery also hosts the annual Carmignac Photojournalism Award and various art fairs and global events including music group BICEP's live global stream of their new album in March 2021. To mark its 40th anniversary, the Gallery opened The Long Now: Saatchi Gallery at 40 on 5 November 2025, an expansive group exhibition spanning two floors and nine exhibition spaces, supported by De Beers London. Curated by Philippa Adams, who served as Senior Director of Saatchi Gallery from 1999 to 2020, the exhibition brought together newly commissioned works and historic pieces by artists including Jenny Saville, Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk, Richard Wilson, Alex Katz, and Olafur Eliasson, alongside emerging voices. Central to the show was Wilson's installation 20:50, presented for the first time on the top floor of the Duke of York's HQ building. The gallery is currently led by Director Paul Foster, who described 2025 as "a momentous year for the Gallery," marking "40 years of showcasing contemporary art to a wide audience."
Timeline
1985 – 30,000-square-foot (2,800 m2) Saatchi Gallery opens at Boundary Road, London NW8, featuring works by Donald Judd, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol. This was the first UK exhibition for Twombly and Marden.
1986 – Exhibits Anselm Kiefer and Richard Serra.
1987 – The New York Art Now show introduces American artists including Jeff Koons, Robert Gober, Ashley Bickerton, Carroll Dunham and Phillip Taaffe to the UK.
1988–1991 ¬– Introduces artists including Leon Golub, Phillip Guston, Sigmar Polke, Bruce Nauman, Richard Artschwager and Cindy Sherman to London.
1992 – Curates its first Young British Artists show Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn, Rachel Whiteread, Gavin Turk, Glenn Brown, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville and Gary Hume were all presented in these exhibitions.
1996 – Sixth Young British Artists show featuring Dan Coombs
1997 – Opens Sensation: Young British Art from the Saatchi Gallery at the Royal Academy featuring 42 artists including The Chapman Brothers, Marcus Harvey, Damien Hirst, Ron Mueck, Jenny Saville, Sarah Lucas & Tracey Emin. Sensation attracted over 300,000 visitors, a record for a contemporary exhibition.
1999 – Sensation at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.
1999 – Sensation tours to Brooklyn Museum of Art.
1999 – Donates 100 artworks to the Arts Council of Great Britain Collection, which operates a 'lending library' to museums and galleries around Britain.
2000 – Donates 40 works through the National Art Collections Fund to eight museums across Britain.
Saatchi Online
In 2006, during the period in limbo between premises, the gallery's website began an open-access section, including Your Gallery, where artists can upload up to twenty works and a biography to a personal page. Over 100,000 artists had done so as of 2010, and the site receives an estimated 73 million hits a day. Your Gallery was later rebranded as Saatchi Online. In September 2008, Alexa Internet ranked Saatchi Gallery among the leading 300 websites in the world. In March 2012, Alexa ranked Saatchi Online's position at 30,454. In November 2007, it was estimated that professional artists registered sell over $100 million of art directly from the site annually. In 2008, Saatchi Online launched a saleroom section that hosts over 84,000 entries from artists wishing to sell their work. For original work, Saatchi Online takes a 30% commission on the final sale price. If a Promotional discount code is offered, SO and Artist will split it equally. For prints, artists are entitled to 70% of the profit on each sale. Artists are also responsible for the costs of print production.
In October 2006, the Saatchi Gallery in association with The Guardian newspaper opened the first ever reader-curated exhibition, showing the work of 10 Saatchi Online artists. Users may also be featured in the Saatchi Online stall at various art fairs. In November 2006 the gallery launched a new section exclusively for art students, called Stuart. Stuart also hosts an annual competition, 4 New Sensations, in association with Channel 4.
Other spaces on Saatchi Online including a forum, live chat, blogs, videos, photography and illustration. The site also publishes grant and funding opportunities. A daily magazine features 24-hour news updated every 15 minutes, as well as articles and reviews by art critics such as Jerry Saltz and Matthew Collings. The site recently began broadcasting an online television channel with video access to art openings, artists' studios, performances and interviews.
Interactive features include the weekly Showdown competition, where users can win an exhibition spot, the Online Studio for creating art (each month a critic selects a winner in whose name a £500 donation is made to a children's charity) a Crits section in which artists can comment on each other's work, and the Street Art section for graffiti, murals, and performance art.
"Museums around the World" features over 3,300 museums. These include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the London National Gallery, the Louvre, and the State Hermitage, as well as small museums.
Controversies
Artists such as Sandro Chia and Sean Scully, to whom Saatchi had been a patron in the late 1970s and early 1980s, felt betrayed by him when their work was sold in bulk from his collection, and Saatchi was accused of destroying Chia's career. Saatchi said that the matter only became an issue because Chia "had a psychological need to be rejected in public" and is now "most famous for being dumped", but that he had only ever owned seven Chias, which he sold back to Chia's two dealers, who re-sold them easily to museums or notable collectors. Saatchi claimed that a sale of strong work can help to galvanise the market for them.
In 1997, in Sensation, London, Marcus Harvey's giant painting of Myra Hindley made from children's hand prints was attacked by two men with ink and eggs, and picketed by the Mothers Against Murder and Aggression protest group, accompanied by Winnie Johnson, the mother of one of Hindley's Moors murders victims. The work was restored and exhibited.
The Sensation show in New York offended Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, because of Chris Ofili's painting, The Holy Virgin Mary, which incorporates elephant dung. Giuliani, who had seen the work in the catalog but not in the show, called it "sick stuff" and threatened to withdraw the annual $7 million City Hall grant from the Brooklyn Museum hosting the show, because "You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion." John O'Connor, the Cardinal of New York, said, "one must ask if it is an attack on religion itself", and the president of America's biggest group of Orthodox Jews, Mandell Ganchrow, called it "deeply offensive". William A Donohue, President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, said the work "induces revulsion". Giuliani started a lawsuit to evict the museum, and Arnold Lehman, the museum director, filed a federal lawsuit against Giuliani for breaching the First Amendment.
Hillary Clinton and the New York Civil Liberties Union spoke up for the museum. The editorial board of The New York Times said Giuliani's stance "promises to begin a new Ice Age in New York's cultural affairs." The paper also carried a petition in support signed by 106, including Susan Sarandon, Steve Martin, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Kurt Vonnegut and Susan Sontag, saying that the mayor "blatantly disregards constitutional protection for freedom of the arts." Ofili, who is Roman Catholic, said, "elephant dung in itself is quite a beautiful object." The museum produced a yellow stamp, saying the artworks on show "may cause shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria and anxiety." and Ofili's painting was shown behind a Plexiglass screen, guarded by a museum attendant and an armed police officer. Jeffrey Hogrefe, New York Observer art critic, said, "They wanted to get some publicity and they got it. I think it was pretty calculated." The editor-in-chief of the New York Art & Auction magazine, Bruce Wolmer, said: "When the row eventually fades the only smile will be on the face of Charles Saatchi, a master self-promoter." Giuliani lost his court case and was forced to restore funding.
Artists shown at the Saatchi Gallery
Boundary Road
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2012
2013
2014
2015
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2025
Duke of York's HQ
The Revolution Continues: New Art From China
Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East
The Triumph of Painting
Out Of Focus: Photography Now
The Power Of Paper
Black Mirror
Penumbra
Sweet Harmony: Rave Today
Kaleidoscope
JR: Chronicles
London Grads Now
In Bloom
RHS Botanical Art & Photography Show 2021
Right Here Right Now
Carmignac Photojournalism Award
Antisocial Isolation
TUTANKHAMUN
We Live in An Ocean of Air
Johnnie Cooper: Throe on Throe
Philip Colbert: Hunt Paintings
Known Unknowns
Publications
The Revolution Continues: New Art From China
Sarah Kent, "Shark Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s", Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd, 2003, ISBN 0-85667-584-9.
Rita Hatton and John A. Walker, "Supercollector, a Critique of Charles Saatchi", The Institute of Artology, 3rd edition 2005, paperback, ISBN 0-9545702-2-7
USA Today
The Triumph Of Painting
The Triumph Of Painting, Supplementary Volume
The Triumph Of Painting, Supplementary Volume
100 The Work That Changed British Art
Hell, Jake & Dinos Chapman
Paula Rego
Young Americans
Stephan Balkenhol
Fiona Rae & Gary Hume
Duane Hanson
Shark Infested Waters, The Saatchi Collection Of British Art In The 90's
Young German Artists 2
Sensation
Alex Katz: 25 Years Of Painting
Young Americans 2
Neurotic Realism
Eurovision